• Interviews

Ethan Hawke Talks Chet Baker in “Born To Be Blue”

Jazz musicians are in season right now – next week Don Cheadle is coming out with his passion project Miles Ahead, a Miles Davis biopic in which he’s both actor and director.  And right now Canadian director Robert Budreau offers us what he calls “an anti-biography” of another jazz legend, Chet Baker – Born To Be Blue. Using an odd corner of Chet’s career – his brief stretch as a Hollywood actor in the mid-1950s – Budreau imagines the master and troubled trumpeter as the star of his own biopic, a Hollywood production celebrating his comeback in the 1960s, after a dark period of heroin addiction and a savage beating that led to the loss of all his teeth, rendering him unable to play his instrument for a long while. Ethan Hawke plays Chet as both the musician and the actor trying to play himself – a delicious challenge for any pro. In this exclusive conversation with our Katherine Tulich, Hawke talks about Chet’s demons and extraordinary gifts.